Two farmers markets in and I still don't know if the bakery idea is real

Sofia Ramirez· Neighborhood bakery-café idea, testing it at two farmers markets· Idea stage, Food & Beverage·1w

I've been selling at two farmers markets since April, mostly to figure out whether anyone actually wants what I want to make. Saturday market I sell out by eleven. Sunday market I sit there until close with half my table still full and go home with forty dollars.

What I can't tell is what any of that proves. Sold out could mean my prices are too low. It could mean Saturday has four times the foot traffic and I'd sell rocks if I wrapped them nicely. Nobody has ever said no to my face, which I'm starting to think is the problem with asking friendly people at a market stall.

My husband thinks I should stop dithering and go find a small space. I think I'd be signing a five year lease on the strength of a Saturday morning.

For anyone who validated before they signed anything: what did you actually measure? Repeat customers? People who came back specifically for you? I've got a notebook with rough counts and a lot of vibes. I also can't run this as an experiment forever, I'm spending about ninety dollars in ingredients a weekend and my day job pays for the rest.

What would have convinced you?

4 replies

Greg Foster· Open·1w

Pop-ups to storefront here, so the Saturday versus Sunday thing is familiar. What I tracked in the last six months of pop-ups wasn't sales, it was names. Every person who bought twice, I wrote down. By the end I had a list of about 110 people who'd come back for me specifically, and that list is what made the lease feel survivable, because I opened with people who already knew where I was going.

Your sold-out-by-eleven is a supply number, not a demand number. Bring fifty percent more next Saturday and see where it stops. If you still sell out, put a dollar on the price and watch what happens. That's two weekends and it costs you almost nothing.

Marcus Thibodeaux· Registered·1w

Twelve years in other people's kitchens and I still got the demand question wrong the first time, so take this with salt. The thing I'd measure is whether anyone is annoyed when you're not there. I skipped one market for a wedding and got four texts asking where I was. That was more useful to me than any good sales day.

Also, on the lease thing, there's a middle step. Before I bought the truck I did three months of catering out of a licensed commissary kitchen, rented by the hour. Not glamorous, but it let me cook at volume without signing anything longer than a month.

Sofia Ramirez· Idea stage·1w

The commissary idea is the first thing anyone has said that I could actually do next month. There's one about twenty minutes from me that I'd assumed was for established businesses only, so I'll call them Monday. And I like the annoyed test better than the sold out test, at least it's about me and not about the weather.

Cheryl Dunn· Open·1w

CPA hat on for a second, and this is only what I see across the books I keep, not advice for your situation. Ninety dollars of ingredients a weekend isn't the number that will hurt you. The number that hurts is the one you can't see yet, which is what a real space costs every month before a single customer walks in. Rent, utilities, insurance, the equipment payment.

Write that monthly figure down before you fall in love with a storefront, then work out how many Saturday mornings it takes to cover it. Most people I sit with have never done that multiplication until after they've signed.

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